The invention relates to information integration environments. More in detail, the invention relates to a method for providing data privacy in information integration environments.
Business information such as customer, patient or employee information may be governed by data privacy regulations in many countries (e.g. Germany's Federal Data Protection Act or European Union (EU) Directive 95/46/EC on the Protection of Personal Data) and must be protected against unauthorized access. Other data objects might be sensitive for competitive business reasons and should be protected against unauthorized access. This should also be the case during information integration processing—which is not the case today exposing sensitive data to risk due to unauthorized access.
In information integration processing, a set of data is extracted from one or more source systems, transformed by using one or more operators and provided to one or more target entities. Such information integration systems are also known as Extract Transform Load systems (ETL systems). ETL systems are commonly used to integrate data from multiple applications. For example, a cost accounting system may combine data from payroll, sales and purchasing source systems. Above-mentioned data privacy regulations have to be also considered during information integration processing.
Disadvantageously, information integration systems, such as ETL systems, do not comprise effective tools for implementing said data privacy regulations.